Zoology fifth among top research universities in scholarly productivity index

01/11/2007

Share this Story:

Miami's zoology department is ranked fifth in the country in a new annual index of graduate programs.

The Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index, partly financed by the State University of New York at Stony Brook and produced by Academic Analytics, a for-profit company, rates faculty members' scholarly output at nearly 7,300 doctoral programs around the country.

The 2005 index compiles overall institutional rankings on 166 large research universities, which include 15 or more Ph.D. programs, as well as 61 smaller research universities, which contain between one and 14 Ph.D. programs. Miami ranks 20th overall among small research universities.

The new index, according to Academic Analytics, is the first completely objective measure of productivity. It examines faculty members who are listed on a Ph.D. program's Web site and measures the productivity of each named faculty member. (The 2005 index rated 177,816 faculty members.) Faculty members can be judged on as many as three factors, depending on the most important variables in the given discipline: publications, which can include the number of books and journal articles published as well as citations of journal articles; federal-grant dollars awarded; and honors and awards. For each discipline, a weight is assigned to each variable.

Miami's zoology department ranked fifth, after the University of Washington, Colorado State University, University of Wisconsin at Madison and Cornell University.